Review of *Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950*

Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950 is a long-overdue, rigorous study of Japanese American sculpture artist Isamu Noguchi’s early career over the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, which respectively span the Popular Front era, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. In her book, Amy Lyford deftly unearths archived, uncompleted plans for sculptures and artistic structures such as Noguchi’s Monument to the Plow (1933-1934), his Carl Mackley Memorial plaster model (1935), his worker sculpture for the World’s Fair Labor Pavilion (1937) and bathing pools in the Japanese American internment camp in Poston, Arizona, where he voluntarily enrolled himself for about six months in 1942. She also explores some of his finished and well-established sculptures such as his cement mural History Mexico (1936), his V-8 engine sculpture, the Ford “Chassis” Fountain (1939), his steel Associated Press mural (1938-1940), and his wartime and postwar sculptures My Arizona (1942), This Tortured Earth (1943), Monument to Heroes (1943), Lunar Infant (1944), Kouros (1944-1945), and Cronos (1947), among many others. She introduces her book with an incisive analysis of Noguchi’s well-known sculpture Death (Lynched Figure) (1934), which inserts Noguchi into the studies of Afro-Orientalism while exemplifying the artist’s preoccupation with questions surrounding race in the 1930s. Furthermore, his associations with Mexican American artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, which Lyford discusses, opens Noguchi criticism to scholars interested in Asian-Latino studies.

Working against a body of criticism that has historically orientalized and essentialized Noguchi as a “primitive” Japanese artist, Lyford argues that it was during the decades of the 1930s and 1940s when Noguchi was reinventing himself as a Japanese American through his art. She historicizes his perspective by claiming the particular importance of his artistic rearticulation of his race during the era of Asian exclusion (1882-1943) and Japanese American internment during the war. Furthermore, she points out that his artistic diversity resisted the cult of individual style that was all the rage among contemporary Abstract Expressionists and art critics; for this reason and because of his race, he was misunderstood during the 1940s by leading art critics such as Thomas Hess and Clement Greenberg.

Lyford argues that the recent “‘multicultural’ approach in art history…meant that by the time Noguchi died in 1988, he was considered one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century[,]” (7); however, art historians and critics have consistently conflated his Japanese heritage with his work by orientalizing it as a “synthesis of ‘East and West’” (4) and classifying his style as “ancient,” “primitive,” (166) and essentially Japanese, instead of American. Taking to task the field of art history for its inordinate focus on heterosexual, white male artists (161), Lyford explains that her study of Noguchi and his work contributes to the recent efforts to expand the field of art history to include social minorities such as women, blacks, Asians, and Latinos (7). She goes on to claim that, despite the increasing inclusivity of the field, its aestheticization of Noguchi’s Japaneseness has prevented the proper historicization of his work: she states, “To see in his art of the 1930s and 1940s primarily the expression of his Japanese American essence shortchanges him as an artist with broad aims for his work: his goal was to recast the artist in American society as part of a socially concerned community” (7).

Situating works such as Monument to the Plow, History Mexico, the Ford “Chassis” Fountain, and the Associate Press mural in the 1930s, a decade which American Studies scholar Michael Denning has famously termed “the cultural front” or “the laboring of American culture,” Lyford explores the Noguchi’s leftist politics and his belief in art as a social expression of collectivity and community in Part I, entitled “Labor.” She devotes her first chapter to Noguchi’s Monument to the Plow, an unfinished project that has been largely dismissed by art historians. His pyramidal design of American agrarian landscape, according to Lyford, “commemorate[s] the changing role of the farmer in New Deal society” (42), alludes to the Jeffersonian myth of America’s pastoral roots and reclaims Noguchi’s Americanness during the period of Japanese exclusion in which Japanese living in the U.S. were denied American citizenship and rights to own land. His cement mural History Mexico was a collective, public art project with other artists associated with the leftist artist Diego Rivera (whom Noguchi met in 1934), which demonstrated Noguchi’s celebration of community-based, public art. Learning, however, from Rivera’s well-known debacle in painting Lenin in his Man at the Crossroads (1933) mural at Rockefeller Center, which was subsequently destroyed in 1934, Noguchi tempered his leftist politics in his Associated Press steel mural at Rockefeller Center by focusing on the dynamic “‘work’ of news media” (68) rather than manual labor. Likewise, his Ford “Chassis” Fountain depicts the commodity and reminder of labor—the Ford V-8 engine—but not labor, itself. As Lyford indicates in her third chapter, these latter two projects taught Noguchi the merits of political compromise as necessary to inciting social progress within a capitalist system (104).

Part II, entitled “Race,” includes Lyford’s fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters on Noguchi’s internment, his cynical sculptures following his internment in the 1940s, and his reception in postwar New York, respectively. Lyford discusses his organization of and work with a group named the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy (NWAMD) shortly after the passage of Executive Order 9066. Under the aegis of the NWAMD and with the permission of the government, Noguchi voluntarily interned himself at the Japanese American internment camp in Poston, Arizona, in an effort to pilot an arts and crafts program “to mitigate some of the criticism likely to be lodged against what was racial discrimination on the part of a constitutional democracy” (109). Arriving in the spring of 1942, Noguchi came to terms with the untenability of his plans for bathing pools at the Poston camp by the summer and requested permission to return to New York. Despite his efforts, he was not permitted to leave until November, when he was granted only a temporary release to go to New York. Discriminated against based on his race, Noguchi was subsequently threatened to be reinterned at the Manzanar camp in 1945 by the War Relocation Authority. Lyford claims that his disillusionment with American democracy from the Japanese American internment, including his own, and the tragic atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war, influenced his cynical sculptures of humanity in the mid- to late 1940s and early 1950s. She brilliantly reads his postwar suspended sculpture, Lunar Infant, as “an internee…under physical and psychological control…reflect[ing] the contingency of the relocatable, portable body” (151). In her analysis of Life magazine’s coverage of his Kouros sculpture, she highlights the ways in which the relocatability of his sculptures, particularly Kouros, reflects the relocation of Japanese Americans during the war. Lyford underscores the pessimism of Kouros which, in contrast with the traditional Greek figure of strapping youth, exposes a hollowed-out skeleton of Western civilization and democracy, “suggest[ing] that the ideal kouros figure has been eviscerated” (131). She also offers an illuminating reading of Noguchi’s oft-anthologized sculpture My Arizona, which she relates to the pyramidal structure of Monument to the Plow in its design and political landscape. Reflective of his time of interment in Arizona, this piece depicts the violation of a “feminized site” as does his later sculpture, This Tortured Earth (139).

Noguchi’s leftist politics and his experiences with racism, leveled specifically at Japanese Americans, influenced his diverse art, especially during the postwar period in which universal humanism was part of the Cold War ideology and championed by the art world. As Lyford argues, his refusal to settle into a singular style ran counter to the cult of individualism that was celebrated among Abstract Expressionists. Consequently, art critics such as Clement Greenberg regarded Noguchi’s sculpture work as inferior to contemporary painters such as Jackson Pollock, relegating him to the margins of Abstract Expressionism. Lyford notes that, as a student of Constantin Brancusi and a mentee of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Noguchi set out to produce his own varied style that could not be easily commodified but would, instead, be socially engaged, community-oriented and committed to political progress; due to the neglect of historicization and analysis of Noguchi’s social aims by critics, this somewhat redundantly stated claim nevertheless seems necessary. Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism contributes to the small but growing body of anti-essentialist studies on Noguchi that are being done by art historians and critics such as Bert Winther-Tamaki and Valerie J. Fletcher. Written in animated and lucid prose, this book is that of a seasoned scholar whose intervention in Noguchi criticism performs the tremendous work of critiquing and making socially relevant inroads in the field of art history.